[Israel.pm] math problem

[Peter Gordon]

The first rule when using floating point numbers, is never to compare
them. What you have to do instead is something like this. 

$epsilon = 1e-6
abs($result - $a) < $epsilon

It is up to you to choose the accuracy you need for epsilon.


On Sun, 2005-11-13 at 10:43 +0000, Yishay Weiss wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This here is so basic I can't imagine it wasn't discussed before. Still, 
> does anyone care to tell me what's going on here? Can perl be failing to 
> subtract properly?
> 
> I run this script: (perl 5.8.4 on windows XP, but I also tried it with 5.8.0 
> on Linux)
> 
> ========
> 
> $a = 0.3847;
> $b = 0.4303;
> $c = 0.0456;
> 
> $result = $b - $c;
> 
> print "a: $a\nresult: $result\n";
> print "a == result ? ". ($a == $result)."\n";
> 
> =====
> 
> and I get:
> 
> =====
> 
> a: 0.3847
> result: 0.3847
> a == result ?
> 
> =======
> 
> Which is wrong. Then I run the same script with slightly bigger numbers:
> 
> ========
> 
> $a = 0.3847 * 10;
> $b = 0.4303 * 10;
> $c = 0.0456 * 10;
> 
> $result = $b - $c;
> 
> print "a: $a\nresult: $result\n";
> print "a == result ? ". ($a == $result)."\n";
> 
> =========
> 
> and get:
> 
> ========
> 
> a: 3.847
> result: 3.847
> a == result ? 1
> 
> =======
> 
> Which makes perfect sense. Any ideas?
> 
> Yishay
> 
> 
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